Typically Snarky Image (source not known - found all over the interwebs, so let me know if it's yours)

Online snark towards IE, particularly in Twitter, is really common and I keep seeing comments in my timeline like these:

Love that WordPress might be dropping IE6 support in 3.2. You might as well take care of IE7 while you’re at it.

- @jschuller

or

sometimes I wonder if going around the globe, uninstalling every single copy of IE, is less time-consuming than debugging

- @RobPoort

or

What’s sad is how much of a time suck #IE really is for developers. Think of the billions spent on just debugging for IE!

@Dr_Overdose

And they used to really wind me.  Happily they don’t any more.  I’m over it.

So why did they wind me up?  Because the amount of time and energy expended in whinging about Internet Explorer in the industry is ridiculous.  It hasn’t changed in five years either.  The whinging is still there. It just never stops. And it needs to.

It’s an Environment Problem, Stupid

This is where I’m going to no doubt draw some criticism, quite possibly from my colleagues even, but here goes:

Internet Explorer, from version 6, is as much a limiting part of our web environment as the potholes and bumps in our roads are a limiting part of car design.

A car designer is powerless to change the roads in your city or country, just like you and I are powerless to make enterprises change their browser of choice. They don’t care about whether it makes a bit of extra work for us, they care about how much extra work upgrading will be for them.

Of course we can take the moral high ground. IE8 is more secure than IE7. IE9 is faster and more standards compliant. Good, solid reasons for upgrading. But no more likely to be listened to than the advice a car designer from Lotus might give to Greece about the environmental and safety benefits that surfacing their roads to a higher standard might bring. Greece has other priorities than listening to a car designer, and enterprises have higher priorities than listening to the advice of web developers.

So What’s the Real Answer for Enterprise Users?

We found a very real problem for our clients – the back-end of WordPress is a pretty poor place to work in with IE6 and sometimes poor in IE7.  It’s usually passable in the latter, but in some enterprises we found that IE7 installs were so locked down that some functionality, particularly within third party plugins, just wouldn’t work well or was so slow as to be unusable.

In the end we recommended that content teams should be allowed to use Firefox or Google Chrome internally. In all cases so far this advice has been heeded. With Chrome it even has the advantage that it can be installed by users even on Windows PCs with very locked down permissions because of the way it’s coded to not need any admin access. That means you can probably get your content managers running a decent browser without any involvement from IT. Portable Apps on USB sticks can also be run, meaning Firefox and other tools can be made available.

But do check whether that might not be in breach of local IT rules – I wouldn’t want any of you to get into trouble now.

And for Web Developers and Designers?

In terms of web development we’re all going to have to do our best with progressive enhancement. The interconnect/it site works perfectly well in IE6, but has different features to when it’s view in Firefox, and different again if viewed in Chrome.

There are points when you have to make a judgement call. Is it worth supporting that last 5% using out of date browsers? Well, that depends. It’s simple maths – if, say, the cost of supporting a browser with 5% share of your site’s traffic is less than the profit you make from those visitors then you continue to support it. Don’t complain, just do it. That’s the only possible business case you have to make. It may not be fun, but if you’re a professional it’s the only thing you can do. If you’re a hobbyist then support whatever browser you feel like – it’s entirely your choice, and don’t feel obliged to support minority browsers when you’re not making any money from your sites.

And I totally get it.

In fact, a failure of how standards apply to web pages is one of the reasons why, until really quite recently, I’d avoided having anything to do with Web Design. I hated it. I hated that even if you structured your code correctly it would look right only in half the browsers you tested in.

Well, this is going to change over the coming five years. Standards will become far more important, and odd hacks will slowly fade into the background. Browsers, my friends, are going to have to become a whole lot less forgiving.

And there lies the rub – with tougher browsers, building websites will become a lot harder for non-technical types. In fact, it could become near impossible. On the upside, tools like WordPress will be able to offer more choices to the user because the code will know that what it outputs to the browser will work.

So the internet’s going to get a lot better in the coming years… but if you’re not prepared to work hard at it then becoming a web developer or designer is going to become far tougher.

Now, we’re not innocent on this either – we’ve done a few sites that get a long way from standard WordPress behaviour.  But quite quickly we realised that not keeping standard messes you up in certain ways:

1. Upgrades can be a nightmare as customisation may need to be re-applied – even if it’s just a theme you’ve developed.
2. Training becomes difficult – especially if the people managing the content aren’t IT or WordPress experts.  They won’t know what is and is not standard and documentation may therefore be confusing.
3. If you need outside help, they’re going to have a learning curve before they understand what’s going on.
4. Slapping a load of plugins into WordPress isn’t always the best way to extend the functionality of the system or a theme you’ve bought or downloaded.  It may be better to find a different CMS or a different theme.

So as time went by, we started to keep our themes more standard in their behaviour, and to stick to well known, well written and well supported plugins.  All have to work in standard ways, and any that do quite blatant hacks have to be left well alone – no matter how cute.

I believe the same applies with most software.  If you bought MS Word and then hacked it to work differently, then every other installation of it that you use with it would need the same hack for you to achieve the same work.  And imagine if you implemented this hacked MS Word across a company – new employees wouldn’t know what was going on as they’d know Word, but not this special version, and when a new version came out you’d have a lot of work to do to hack that too.

I used to apply the same philosophy PeopleSoft implementations – recommending against large tranches of customisation, because they became a maintenance and upgrade liability.  The sites that listened to this common advice, tended to have the most pain-free go-lives and upgrades.  The downside was that I was kind of doing myself out of work – what with being a strong PeopleCode developer.  D’Oh!